Parent Partnerships
ELC Stop Optimising Your Child
ISSUE 2 | TERM 3 | 2026
By Dr Justin Coulson
There’s a multi-billion dollar industry built on making you feel like you’re behind.
Your toddler should be reading. Your three-year-old needs coding. Your four-year-old’s schedule should include Mandarin, swimming, music, and gymnastics – ideally before lunch.
The promise is familiar: get in early, give them the edge, unlock their potential.
I was thinking about this as I reflected on the recent “Enhanced Games” in Las Vegas. If you missed it, the organisers expected records to tumble because they encouraged athletes to dope openly. Fill them with the right substances, the right inputs, and watch them become superhuman.
The Enhanced Games was a failure – and so is pushing our kids to achieve their potential by filling their lives with far too much. The optimisation industry is delivering anxious, overscheduled children and exhausted parents who aren’t getting the results they so desperately crave.
Here’s what the research actually shows. The single greatest predictor of your young child’s development isn’t the app, the programme, or the enrichment schedule. It’s you.
To a child, love is spelled T-I-M-E. Connection – feeling seen, heard, valued, and accepted – will get you better results than all of the structured enrichment you can buy. Present, warm, and unhurried parents are the ultimate optimisation “hack” – only it isn’t a hack. Talking with them. Playing with them. Letting them be bored and watching what they do with it.
The thing is, it isn’t glamorous. It isn’t Instagrammable. You’re not seeing amazing products in stores advertising it.
Why? Because it’s not monetisable. It’s not consumable. It’s just… life the way nature intended it to be for our kids. Free of “enhancement” and “optimisation”-related stress.
Mary Meagher won three Olympic gold medals in the pool at the 1984 LA Games. She said something that stops me every time I read it: “People don’t know how ordinary success is.”
She didn’t mean easy. She meant quiet, repetitive, done without an audience.
Author James Clear puts it this way: “The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.”
Your child stacking the same blocks for the fortieth time isn’t falling behind. They’re doing exactly the work that matters.
You reading them the same story every night for four months isn’t a waste of time. It’s exactly what your child needs. Peek-a-boo for the 600th time? That’s enhancement. Tip, tigi, chasies, tag… call it what you will. That’s optimisation.
At this age, we’re not supposed to be optimising anything except… TIME. That’s the whole box and dice.
Forget everything else. They don’t have to master anything other than how to live life fully and in the moment with people who love them.
And you? Your job is to master being in the moment with them, loving them, connecting with them, and filling their lives with other people who feel just as delighted to breathe the same air they’re breathing as you are.
The best thing you can do for your child right now isn’t another programme. They don’t need any more screens or apps. And they don’t need a single class – unless it’s for fun with friends.
The best thing you can do for your kids is to slow down, show up, and trust the ordinary., and you probably won’t like their curriculum.